Star Wars junkie Mark Dermul has a pretty sweet job: He leads tours in North Africa of different locations featured in the films. On a 2010 trip to Tunisia—er, Tatooine—he and his cohort realized that Luke Skywalker's boyhood home—the Lars Homestead—was in serious disrepair. NPR reports how they brought it back to life.

Dermul and the fans put out a call to Star Wars fans all over the world via Facebook for what they called the "Save Lars Project." They raised more than $11,000 to restore the strange desert igloo hut. But in 2011, the Tunisian government was rocked by the Arab Spring, so the restoration process was put on hold and only just took place this year over an eight day span in late May/early June. Go check out all of the images of the restoration in progress at the Save Lars Project website. [Save Lars Project via NPR via Architizer]